'It's more like a strip club than a restaurant'

Hooters, the American restaurant chain that prides itself on its scantily clad waitresses, has ambitious plans to expand in the UK, which are already facing formidable feminist opposition. Julie Bindel reports

One of the company's own lawyers called Hooters a 'Brestaurant'. Photograph: Gil Cohen Magen/Reuters

On a cold night in Nottingham, I am dining with a companion in a converted warehouse, its walls covered in laminated photographs of large-breasted women. We are greeted by a friendly waitress who tugs uncomfortably at her hotpants as she serves us, handing over a menu featuring a picture of a grinning blonde woman next to a description of the Key Lime Pie. Plasma TVs show clips of testosterone-driven sports - wrestling, basketball and darts - and in the open-plan kitchen, a sticker above the deep-fat fryer offers the motto "No fat chicks".

This restaurant is the only current British branch of Hooters, an American-run chain that operates in 39 US states, Asia, Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and Puerto Rico, and is hoping to come to a town near you. Since 1983, when six midwestern businessmen opened the first Hooters in Florida, the chain has multiplied at a massive rate and now has nearly 400 venues, worth more than $750m (£380m) a year. The UK is the next territory in its sights and if all goes according to plan, there will be a Hooters restaurant in a further 36 locations around the UK by 2012.

On the UK website it says that the company is "focused on each restaurant having a casual, upbeat atmosphere, highest quality of food where the meal is delivered by attractive, vivacious Hooters Girls. We are committed to contributing positively to the local communities." Visiting a Hooters restaurant, it's difficult to see quite how they can achieve that latter aim. The Hooters concept combines simplicity and misogyny, offering food of the finger-licking variety - burgers, wings, fries - and young waitresses wearing uniforms reminiscent of 1970s cheerleaders: skimpy nylon shorts and vests, American tan tights and white baseball shoes. It's clear which part of this equation is meant to pack the punters in. On the way to the Nottingham venue, billboards display huge images of blonde, sparkly-toothed "Hooters girls", while a calendar showcasing "the best Hooters girls of 2008" and T-shirts that read "Hooters chicks dig my ride" are available to buy inside.

As I sit waiting for my fajitas, a crowd of men start celebrating their friend's 18th birthday. The birthday boy stands on the table, strips off his shirt, puts on a Hooters child-size T-shirt (available for kids as young as three, these read "Life Begins at Hooters"), and downs a pint of lager in one go. Several "Hooters girls" rush over, banging out a tune on their drink trays and chanting, "It's your birthday, yes it's true, and we're gonna sing for you." In the US, Hooters girls take part in other displays too, including wet T-shirt contests that come with a sadistic twist - the T-shirt is pre-chilled in the freezer. One lawyer for Hooters summed up the chain's ethos when he dubbed its venues "Breastaurants".

"Hooters is and intends to be more like a lap-dance club than a family restaurant," says Finn MacKay of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution. "Without the sexualised waiters and the soft porn and sport on display, what would men go for? They can get better and cheaper chicken wings in KFC."

Kirsty Bowen, who is coordinating the campaign against the opening of a Hooters branch in Sheffield, believes the brand reinforces the idea that women are objects for male pleasure. "The very fact that they are called Hooters speaks for itself," says Bowen. She claims that the proposed restaurant in Sheffield's Leopold Square would affect the surrounding area and businesses, encouraging the spread of the sex industry, and she has evidence to back this up: the Nottingham branch of the restaurant already forms a crucial part of stag night packages, bringing young men on the hunt for sexist entertainment into the area. Crocodile Events, a company that specialises in such packages, offers stag groups two nights in a Nottingham hotel, including a meal at Hooters, where it promises that customers will be served by "the world-famous Hooters girls". The evening is rounded off with VIP entry to a lap-dancing club.

Before starting work, Hooters girls in the US have to sign a contract that reads: "I hereby acknowledge and affirm that the Hooters concept is based on female sex appeal and that the work environment is one in which joking and innuendo based on female sex appeal is commonplace." It continues: "I also expressly acknowledge and affirm I do not find my job duties, uniform requirements or work environment to be intimidating, hostile or unwelcome." Quite how it is possible to affirm this before you've started your job is anyone's guess. As Carol J Adams, an American academic who has written extensively about Hooters, says, "What this document is making clear is that the women at Hooters should expect to be sexually harassed, and put up and shut up." A Hooters spokesperson denies this, saying that the company has a "model programme" for reporting harassment. "All signing the document means is that we have taken the time to give [the waitress] the full picture of the Hooters concept," he says.

Not surprisingly, a number of sexual harassment lawsuits have been filed over the years by former Hooters girls, following a notorious case against the company in Florida in which the plaintiff alleged that she had been subjected to "an endless torrent of sexually inappropriate remarks, demands for sex and uninvited touching that created a situation in which no reasonable woman would have continued to work". It is unclear how many cases have been brought since, but a former Hooters manager, based in the US, tells me that the majority have been settled out of court. The Hooters spokesperson says there have only been "a handful" of lawsuits given the company's 17,000 employees.

Another anti-Hooters campaigner in the UK is Sophia Deboick, who began speaking out after an application was made for a licence for a Hooters in Southend earlier this year. She has since attracted scores of local people to her cause. Deboick found that almost everyone she spoke to about the issue initially had no idea that Hooters was anything but an ordinary themed restaurant. She says, "The tenor of the debate is 'Oh, there's no problem here, it's just a bit of fun.' And therein lies the danger. If it was a lap-dancing club, people would take that seriously and take notice of the problem, but Hooters can get in surreptitiously because people don't think it's worth worrying about."

Apart from a few couples, most of the customers at the Nottingham branch are, as you would expect, young men. I ask two male students why they like coming to Hooters. "For the girls," one laughs. Our waitress confirms that she's heard it all before. "Most men comment on the 'lovely jugs' when I carry pitchers to their tables," she says. "I just wish they would come up with something original."

Jan Macleod, of the Scottish Coalition Against Sexual Exploitation, which is campaigning against Hooters opening in Scotland, says the chain normalises the sexual exploitation and harassment of young women, and tacitly increases the acceptability of more extreme venues, such as lap-dancing clubs. "Their website says, 'Whoever said you can't get paid for something you love doing, never worked at Hooters,'" says Macleod. "I don't think young women do 'love' the sexual harassment, any more than female customers 'love' to see women staff being objectified."

Campaigners argue that rather than being a boon to the community, Hooters gives permission for male customers to view their female waitresses as pieces of meat, and that this climate could potentially promote loutish, sexist and threatening behaviour from some male customers in the vicinity of the restaurants.

"The men in Hooters, especially those on stag weekends, create the wrong kind of atmosphere for a family-friendly area in Sheffield," says Bowen. "An increase in antisocial behaviour is the least we can expect. If we are to challenge the high levels of violence against women, we need to end this kind of objectification of women, not invite it on to our high streets."